ned the Academies. For several weeks, when he
first came to Paris, he had posed as a model. Sitting there before the
students, glowing with shame and pride, his heart was defiant, and not
one of the students, who modelled the fine bust and head, imagined how
ardent his heart was or what an artist posed for them. Often he longed
to seize a tool from inefficient hands and say, "Here, my children, like
this, don't you see?"

He learned much from the rare visits of the Master and his cursory,
hasty criticism, but he welcomed the impersonal labour in the atelier of
Barye, where he was not a student but a worker, mechanical supposedly,
yet creative to his fingertips. And as he watched Barye work, admiring
him profoundly, eager for the man's praise, crushing down his own
individuality, careful to do nothing but the technical, mechanical
things he was given to do there--before his hand grew tired, while his
brain was fresh, he would plan and dream of what he would do in his own
attic, and he went back as a thirsty man to a source.

There came the dead season. Barye shut his atelier and went to Spain.
There was nothing to do for Antony Fairfax and he was without any means
of making his bread. After a few days of idleness, when his hands and
feet were chilblained and he could hardly pass the cafes and
restaurants, where the meals were cooking, without a tightening of the
chest, he thought to himself, "Now is the time for the competition money
to fall among us like a shower of gold"; but he had not heard one word
from America or from Falutini, to whom the result was to have been
written and who had Fairfax's address.

Dearborn, in a pair of old tennis trousers, a shabby black velvet
jacket, sat Turkish fashion on his divan, his writing tablet on his
knees. For weeks past he had been writing a five-act play--

"Too hungry, Tony, by Jove, to go on. Every time I start to write, the
lines of some old-time menu run across the page--Canards a la presse,
Potage a la Reine. Just now it was only pie and yellow cheese, such as
we have out in Cincinnati."

Fairfax was breaking a mould. By common consent a fire had been built in
the stove. Tony had taken advantage of the warm water to mix his
plaster. Dearborn came over from his sofa.

"I wouldn't care to have a barrel of plaster roll on those chilblains
of mine, Tony. It's a toss up with us now, isn't it, which of us _can_
wear the boots?"

Pinched and haggard, his hands in his pocke